Spatiotemporal Change Analysis and Prediction of the Great Yellow River Region (GYRR) Land Cover and the Relationship Analysis with Mountain Hazards

Chunliu Gao, Deqiang Cheng (), Javed Iqbal and Shunyu Yao
Additional contact information
Chunliu Gao: School of Cultural Industry & Tourism Management, Henan University, Kaifeng 475001, China
Deqiang Cheng: Key Research Institute of Yellow River Civilization and Sustainable Development & Collaborative Innovation Center on Yellow River Civilization Jointly Built by Henan Province and Ministry of Education, Henan University, Kaifeng 475001, China
Javed Iqbal: Department of Earth Sciences, The University of Haripur, Haripur 22620, Pakistan
Shunyu Yao: China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research, Beijing 100038, China

Land, 2023, vol. 12, issue 2, 1-24

Abstract: The study of land use/land cover (LULC) changes plays an important guiding role in regional ecological protection and sustainable development policy formulation. Especially, the simulation study of the future scenarios may provide a hypothetical prospect which could help to determine the rationality of current and future development policies. In order to support the ecological protection and high-quality development strategy of the Yellow River Basin proposed by the Chinese government, the Great Yellow River Region (GYRR) is taken as the research area. The multi-period land cover data are used to carry out the analysis of land cover changes. The MOLUSCE (Modules for Land Use Change Simulations) plugin of QGIS software is used to carry out a land cover simulation and prediction study for 2030 on a large regional scale. Finally, the land cover status in the mountainous areas of the GYRR is analyzed thoroughly. The results show a decrease in agricultural land and increase in forest land during the past 25 years from 1995 to 2020, and that this trend would continue to 2030. The landscape pattern index analysis indicates that the land cover in the GYRR has become more and more abundant, and the degree of fragmentation has become higher and higher, while landscape patches were more evenly distributed in the GYRR until 2020. On the other hand, the landscape pattern would tend to achieve a certain degree of stability in 2030. The decrease in farmland and the increase in forest land illustrate the efforts made by the GYRR residents and governments in improving the ecological environment under the policy of returning farmland to forests and grasslands. On the other hand, although the residential areas in the mountainous areas are far away from the mountain hazard historical points because of consideration during construction with the help of the development of disaster prevention and mitigation over the years, there could be problem of rapid and haphazard urbanization. It is worth mentioning here that the harmonious and sustainable development of people and land in the GYRR mountainous areas still requires a large amount of effort.

Keywords: land cover; QGIS; MOLUSCE; Great Yellow River Region; mountain hazards (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q15 Q2 Q24 Q28 Q5 R14 R52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-445X/12/2/340/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-445X/12/2/340/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jlands:v:12:y:2023:i:2:p:340-:d:1048183

Access Statistics for this article

Land is currently edited by Ms. Carol Ma

More articles in Land from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().